Illustration by illustration by Hanna Barczyk
There are few things as fascinating as other people’s marriages. If we weren’t curious, there would be very few HBO dramas, and no Edith Wharton novels. Marriages are riddles, wrapped in history, inside real estate, to misquote Winston Churchill. We wonder how those two squabblers could stay together so long, or what her reasons could possibly be for marrying such a beast. Was it his very nice library? Was he holding her father hostage in his dungeon?
Neither is true in the case of Donald and Melania Trump. He doesn’t even write his own books, let alone read other people’s. So what, then, keeps them together? Is it her lack of cellulite? When they were still dating, Mr. Trump went on Howard Stern’s radio show to praise his future wife in prose worthy of John Donne: Not only was she free of cellulite, she didn’t even know the word in English.
I discovered this delicious nugget while reading CNN reporter Kate Bennett’s new biography of the First Lady, Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography. The book also says that Mr. Trump haggled for his future wife’s giant engagement rock, and that he likely leaked nude modelling photos of her to the New York Post in order to distract attention from a rough patch in his presidential campaign.
And yet, Melania stays. She stays! Through the Stormy storms, and the thousand other indignities the President dumps on her and the American people, Melania stays the course. Occasionally, through a crack, we see her flick away her husband’s hand like a dead fly. Perhaps she pronounces her displeasure through her clothing, wearing a pussy-bow blouse after the infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape or a jacket that says “I really don’t care do u?” to visit the migrant children her husband’s administration ripped from their parents and put in cages. (Ms. Bennett says there are no coincidences in Ms. Trump’s choices of clothing, and that the jacket was likely a roundabout dig at Ivanka Trump.)
Because she is largely silent in all of her five languages, and because she maintains a subdued demeanour, Melania becomes an empty screen onto which the public can project all of its anxiety. Humans are story gluttons, craving a narrative that fits our expectations of the world, or at least one that will give us hope. So Melania becomes a princess in need of rescuing, trapped in an echoing White House with an ogre, with only her son and a whole pile of Christian Louboutins for company.
An entire industry has sprung up in the vacuum to support this wishful narrative. On Saturday Night Live, Cecily Strong plays Melania as a mournful prisoner dreaming of sand between her toes and forging a relationship with an operator at the Gucci call centre. On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Melania is portrayed as mistress of her fate, in on the joke, winking at the camera. On Twitter, the hashtag #freeMelania springs up every time her husband does something egregious – pretty much on days ending in y.
There’s only one problem: It is wishful thinking. To judge by Ms. Bennett’s book – and by the fact that Melania has not yet jumped in a convertible to find a divorce lawyer in Reno – the White House is less a jail than a magical castle filled with lovely things.
Ms. Bennett, who covers the First Lady for CNN, found herself sitting next to Melania at a press lunch at the White House, and asked her whether “she feels like a prisoner and is miserable inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Melania gestured at the opulence around her and said, “I don’t get it. All that ‘free Melania, free Melania.’ Why would I be unhappy here?”
Why, indeed? Power makes for a nice soft bed, and it’s much more comfortable on Pennsylvania Avenue than it is in the for-profit holding cells on the U.S. border. As it turns out, Ms. Trump is about as much a member of the resistance as Sean Hannity. She is, according to Ms. Bennett, an ideological conservative. She propagated her husband’s false smear that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. It was she who urged her husband to run for president, telling him that if he did, he’d win. And while she did reportedly criticize the administration’s family separation policy to Mr. Trump, she couldn’t have thrown much weight behind it. The separations continue, and the American Civil Liberties Union argues that 1,000 children have been taken away from their parents since the policy officially ended in 2018.
The Melania Trump who appears in the pages of this unauthorized biography has many admirable qualities: She is bright, steely, independent and unmoved by other people’s opinions of her. She adores her son, and is close to the family she left behind in Slovenia (her parents’ lengthy marriage is a model she wants to emulate.) Her own Be Best anti-bullying campaign is a bit of a bust – consider that she could temper the worst bullying in the country with one sharp word to the President at the dinner table – but she loves being around children and is good with them. She really has a way with a hat.
But she is not the hero her country needs. Unsatisfying as it is for those of us who love a happy ending, the silence isn’t muffling a cry for help or justice; it’s just silence. And the princess doesn’t need rescuing, because she’s perfectly happy where she is, on top of the world.